Chains are used to specify rulesets. A packet begins at the top of a chain and progresses downwards until it hits a rule. There are three built-in chains: INPUT, OUTPUT and FORWARD. All outbound traffic passes through the forward chain, and all inbound traffic passes through the FORWARD chain. The three built-in chains have default targets which are used if no rules are hit. User-defined chains can be added to make rulesets more efficient.

Guide

Logging

The LOG target can be used to log packets that hit a rule. Unlike other targets like ACCEPT or DROP, the packet will continue moving through the chain after hitting a LOG target. This means that in order to enable logging for all dropped packets, you would have to add a duplicate LOG rule before each DROP rule. Since this reduces efficiency and makes things less simple, a LOGDROP chain can be created instead.

Limiting log rate

The limit module should be used to prevent your iptables log from growing too large or causing needless hard drive writes. Without limiting, an attacker could fill your drive (or at least your Template:Filename partition) by causing writes to the iptables log.

-m limit is used to call on the limit module. You can then use --limit to set an average rate and --limit-burst to set an initial burst rate. Example:

-A LOGDROP -m limit --limit 5/m --limit-burst 10 -j LOG

This appends a rule to the LOGDROP chain which will log all packets that pass through it. The first 10 packets will the be logged, and from then on only 5 packets per minute will be logged. The "limit burst" is restored by one every time the "limit rate" is not broken.

syslog-ng

Assuming you are using syslog-ng which is the default in Archlinux, you can control where iptables' log output goes this way: